- Theme
Burnt Norton V · Line 28 ·Love is itself unmoving
Love here plays the role of the still point: the unmoving cause and end of all movement. The idea has two famous ancestors. Aristotle’s God is an unmoved mover, causing motion as an object of desire; and the last line of Dante’s Paradiso names the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Desire is movement; love, its source and goal, is not.
Sources Dante Alighieri (locator to be verified) (Paradiso XXXIII, final line) Aristotle (locator to be verified)